She pulled herself smoothly onto the deck, yanked the tiller to throw the yacht into a hard turn, then ducked and braced in the mast well as the boom snapped across the yacht's frame like a hard right cross.
TWANG
said the cable lanyards. The jib-sail plumed out like a jellyfish and drove the craft through a sharp one-hundred-eighty turn, then she was up and leaning out hard on the port rail. The yacht kicked sharply as the strong sea wind caught the sail fresh out of the turn, jerking the port side clear out of the water and driving the yacht directly back along its course.
She yelled again as she leaned out and counterweighted the wind with her body again, humming and in perfect tune. In these moments she felt free and everything else fell away. This was speed unlike anything else.
"Too fast," came Lara's crackly voice over the amplified speakers in the yacht's small cabin. "You'll tear the rudder to bits like that, and you'll be lucky if half the boom brackets are not shearing loose again."
Anna laughed and pulled harder into the wind, driving the sail almost horizontal to the water, so low she could see over its concave swell to the tiny figure of Lara on the beach and the twinkle of her binoculars.
"It's what it's made for," she shouted over the crash of breakers.
"It's not what we're made for," Lara's voice called back through the speakers. "You're too far out for us to get you. The riptide's strong today and you may not be able to swim back if you go in."
Anna laughed. Lara worried all the time. Amo worried all the time. Cerulean worried most of all. None of them seemed to understand that the whole point of a racing yacht was to race.
"Plus the microscope's up," Lara said. "Jake's got it working finally. Surely that's worth surviving for."
Anna punched the air. The yacht momentarily wobbled, she almost lost control, and had to throw herself hard to the right to catch it before it capsized. An inch wrong in either direction and the line could break; the mast would come rocking back like a trebuchet arm and rip her head clean off. She got it just right though, and the wind kicked back in at just the necessary moment and angle. Her heart pounded madly and she laughed.
It would be pretty ridiculous to drown on the day the electron microscope finally came online with some usable slides.
"What was that?" Lara's voice came through sharply on the speakers.
Anna laughed louder. "New trick in my repertoire. I'll be back in ten. Don't look at anything without me!"
"Cerulean says slow down."
"Tell Robert I'm coming in hot!"
In one smooth motion she slacked the boom line again, let the sway of the yacht pull her back into the mast well, and re-angled the tiller at a sudden ninety-degree angle. The brackets crunched, the sail whipped like a gunshot, and then she was soaring back toward the beach with the wind at her back and the mast creaking against the hull.
The electron microscope was up! That was cause for celebration indeed.
* * *
On Hermosa beach Ravi dashed over to help her pull the yacht out of the surf. He was sixteen going on six, with all the brains of a carrot cake but the body of a rock god. All that water hauling and corn-cropping in the California sun made him ripple with tanned muscle.
"Hey, Anna," he called as he snatched up the bow-rail and pulled, "nice curves out there."
Cocky-funny, of course. He'd been reading books on flirtation; she'd seen them in his room. There weren't a lot of secrets in new LA, population thirty-six.
"Stick it in your carrot-hole," she replied, the first thing that came to mind, and bound to keep him puzzling for hours.
She hopped off the front rail and bent down quickly to examine the lower keel. Damn, ground up on the sand of course. She'd come in too fast.
"Carrot-hole?" Ravi muttered. "I don't even like carrots."
Nearby Lara strode over the packed wet sand and stood one with one hip cocked sardonically. Only Lara could stand like that, with so much judgment in the angle of her waist. She looked model-good in her Karenina khaki beach slacks and Giovanni fat sunglasses, but then designer gear was for everyone now, and everyday wear.
"The marina would have just taken too long, Anna?" she asked.
"Time is money, auntie," Anna answered. Lara hated to be called auntie. "And you're right here."
"You've scraped up the underside, hey? Scratches lead to blemishes, make fractures make the keel snap. How many times, Anna?"
"How many yachts are there in that marina still?" Anna countered. "Hundreds in each basin alone."
"And do you see a factory pumping out more?"
Anna sighed. It was always like this with Lara, everything had to be a battle. "I'll buff them out, OK? Let's just get to the microscope."
Lara sighed too, letting this one battle go. The microscope was a big deal.
"Get in," she said, "passenger side."
Anna ran over to the sand buggy, raised off the beach on fat traction tires, and sprang into the passenger side. Best not to push it.
"Thanks, Ravi," Lara called over her shoulder. She shot Anna a dangerous glance through the windshield.
"What?" Anna mouthed.
Lara climbed in, started the engine, and they tore off at a sand-spraying pace, jolting Anna backward into her seat. And Lara preached to her about going too fast?
"You take advantage of that boy," Lara shouted over the rush of wind through the open window.
"He likes doing it," Anna answered, "what else has he got to do?"
"It's cruel. He thinks he's getting somewhere."
"Maybe he is."
Lara gave her a withering sidelong glance. "You are a confounding child."
"He's asked me to the summer ball," Anna shouted.
"Of course he has. You're the only one near his age. He's a good boy."
"Whatever."
"Whatever," Lara answered, then let it rest as they raced up the beach even faster than before. In this at least Anna and Lara were much alike; they both loved speed.
Five minutes along the beach, and Lara took them bumping over the low railing and through a slim cement park where once skateboarding kids would have ground out their smooth moves on trick-rails and ramps.
That was kid stuff. Lara skidded the buggy over the sand-strewn sidewalk and onto the Pacific highway, turning north to race up the coast. Anna bit her tongue and looked out the side window at buildings sailing by. These parts of New LA were getting pretty shabby these days.
The area around the Chinese theater still looked smart and polished because they kept it that way; they pruned the grounds and cleaned the windows and repainted the decking with weatherproof paint.
By contrast the condos and shops of leftover Los Angeles were looking decidedly run-down. Many of the windows were perished, foggy with condensation, and wind-blown sand heaped up over the once-green forecourts of apartment blocks. Now only palm trees, dune grass and cacti survived, climbing up and flowering out to block doorways and swimming pools. The building façades were steadily peeling away without maintenance, scoured by the salty, sandy Pacific winds, exposing the inner wood frames at corners and around the edges of windows.
She used to get a big kick out of exploring these places. For a long time she'd done it alone, then when Ravi came after a Southern States cairn-run they'd gone together. Smashing glass had been fun for a while, and experimenting with graffiti cans scrawling on people's old living rooms and bedrooms, until one day Amo had caught them at it.
The disappointment in his face in that moment had stung more than anything Lara ever said or did. Cerulean's disapproval was sweet like red strings by comparison. Amo though had gotten really angry, and she'd felt it like a heat in the air.
"What are you doing, Anna?" he'd asked, standing at the edge of a blue-tiled pool filled with swampy bulrushes, while she and Ravi chopped up doors with a fire-axe and sprayed silver spray-paint onto the foggy windows in obscene designs. "What is any of this for?"
"Did you follow us?" She snapped b
ack. "It's none of your business what I do in my own time."
"It's all my business. Tell me what you think you're doing."
"Why don't you ask him too?" she pointed at Ravi. "He's doing it too."
"I'm asking you, because you should know better. Do you think this is without cost, do you think what you're doing here is just good fun? It takes a cost on you, Anna. It takes a cost on the people who come here and see this. It's not OK to be like this. Everyone else is working to build, and you're out here doing this? It's bullshit."
Just that brought her close to tears. She turned the tears to anger.
"You can't talk! How many places did you wreck, how many people did you kill?"
"That's different. You know it is."
A sullen silence fell. Ravi set his axe down on the cement poolside with a metallic clunk.
"So what then?" Anna challenged. "How big a crime is this for you? Are you going to ask me to leave, like you sent me and Robert away after Julio?"
His eyes went wide at that. She'd aimed for it. He'd sent them away ten years earlier and she'd never forgotten. After Julio had tried to bully her in the theater, Robert had gone after him and beaten him half to death. The bastard had deserved it. Still, Amo had sent Robert away, and Anna had gone with him.
And what kind of man did Julio turn out to be? A rapist and a killer, more dangerous than any of them. But it was her and Cerulean who'd had to leave.
Amo opened his mouth to reply. Maybe he was going to say something about her father, about how he would be ashamed if he saw her doing this. She waited for it, hungry for it even, but it didn't come. Instead Amo just shook his head and walked away, and that's what made it sting the most.
He'd given up. They hardly talked after that.
She blinked and rubbed her eyes.
"Sand," she said to Lara, who was looking at her with a peculiar expression.
Lara grunted. She was Anna's only through-line to Amo now. Through Lara, she'd learned that Amo had been proud of her last year when she 'graduated' from the survival course they'd put together, focused on fire-arms, engineering, plumbing and other essential prepper survival skills. He hadn't said as much to her directly. A nod was all, while the words came through Lara.
"He worries," Lara had said, one evening when they weren't fighting and they just sat on the theater's roof looking out to sea, each drinking a beer. "He worries about you, and me and Cerulean and all the people still out there. I don't think any of us can really understand how much he worries."
"I worry too," Anna had said.
Lara had patted her shoulder. "I know you do, sweetie. I know."
Things since then had only gotten worse.
The sand buggy lurched right off the Vista Del Mar, up Culver Boulevard to the 1 then raced past the Marina Del Ray. Lara couldn't resist getting in another dig as the forest of bobbing masts went by.
"You could have just pulled in here. I would've picked you up."
"All right," Anna said, letting it slide through her defenses.
The 1 blurred through into Santa Monica, where at the edge of the beach Lara swapped it for Santa Monica Boulevard, long-since cleared of the road-clogging traffic they'd found it full of years ago. One of their earliest jobs, after ensuring basic survival amenities, had been to clear New LA's jammed arteries. Most of the cars now sat rusting in broad parking lots, out of the way.
Within ten more minutes they took the turn onto Westwood Boulevard, and within three were revving up through the entrance roads to University of California. Lara pulled up with a cough of dust and sand in the disabled parking space at the front entrance to the Stem Cell Research Center. Even the four-story brick and stone walls here were showing their age, with long discolored patches of damp.
Lara leapt out of the buggy and Anna followed. Up the stairs and in through the open foyer they sped, cleared of gurneys and wheelchairs just like the roads. The rooms either side passed by like flashing postcards, back to the days they'd prepared all this.
They'd salvaged the electron microscope from a research center three hundred and eighty miles northwest in San Francisco, two years ago. It had been covered in soot from an old electrical fire and half the boards were damaged, but they brought it back with them, driving at only twenty miles an hour the whole way down to avoid damaging it.
Ever since then Jake and his team of self-taught engineers had been working on it, switching out boards from the other models they had when they could spare the time. Time and neglect had caused almost all of the parts they found to perish, so putting together a working whole was like a huge 3D jigsaw. It was a passion project and everyone had one. Alongside the yachting, this was Anna's.
Sophia's notes, lifted from her 'SORRY' grave/cairn back in Pennsylvania, had gotten them started on what equipment to use and what kind of samples to take. There was no shortage of desiccated floater bodies to experiment with, trapped in cars or buildings wherever they went.
With the electron microscope they'd finally be able to peer inside the floaters' cell architecture, see inside their minds, and find out what the hell made them tick.
* * *
At the glass wall of their third-floor lab Jake met them, visibly trembling with excitement. His floppy black hair had thinned but he still had the boyish exuberance of ten years earlier, though now he was twenty-nine.
He held out packaged white overalls and Anna and Lara took them and opened then up.
"The ultramicrotome is up," Jake said. "The diamond blade is slicing at seventy nm, we can't get much thinner than that, but it's already provided stunning resolutions on clippings from my leather belt and one of Sulman's beard follicles."
Sulman's swarthy dark face popped up through the glass and he waved. He was the closest they had to an actual medical engineer, as his job had been tech support for X-ray machines before the apocalypse. He always smelled of pickled onions. Anna waved hastily while shrugging into the overalls.
Getting the electron microscope up had been just the final one of the challenges they faced in looking deeply inside the floater brain. There was a vast pyramid of knowledge required that none of them had been trained for, and a mountain of infrastructure that had to be pieced together, with so many of the West Coast research facilities severely damaged by years of compounded earthquake damage.
"We have some fresh samples on the tray," Jake went on. "Blood, brain, skin, spinal fluid from a careful lumbar puncture," here he nodded his head to Anna, who had insisted that none of the ocean should 'die' for their experiments, "spun plasma, renal, vitreous humor from the eyes, heart scrape, cheek swab, spinal column fragment, you name it, we have it, all diced as fine as a turkey roast."
Anna tugged the sleeves of the overalls on, then sprang forward and kissed Jake on the cheek. "So let's do it," she said.
"Shoes and hair," Jake reminded. Lara was already kicking off her sandy sandals and stepping into white lab moon boots. Anna joined in, pulling the overall's hood up atop her frizzy dark cornrows.
"Ladies first," said Jake, and opened the hermetic seal to the small glass airlock. Anna entered, and high velocity winds blew and sucked all the tiny particles off her, then a green light flashed and the inner door opened.
She passed through and bounded over to Sulman, who sat at a molded white desk with several screens inset, and a keyboard with a particle-blocking rubber mold covering it. By his side rested the electron microscope, a tall pillar of white metal and plastic that rose five feet off the desk it was mounted to.
She leaned over Sulman's shoulder to look at the readout screen. "It's really online?" she asked.
He laughed softly, then spoke softly, which was the only way he ever spoke. "Of course, Anna."
Lara and Jake joined them. It was cold in the lab, kept that way to help preserve the samples and keep the hi-tech gear functioning at peak capacity. Sweat from the rush to get here dried cold on Anna's skin, and she shivered. This more than anything was what she'd been aiming at for years.
Lara squeezed her hand and Anna allowed it. Jake moved forward to slide the first of his samples, a tiny glass tray with an infinitesimal slice of stringy brain cord on it, into the black plastic base of the electron microscope's tall pillar.
"Like a rocket about to go off," he muttered, and eased the slide into the delivery slot. The mechanism took it in and rolled it the rest of the way, clicking the entry door closed.
"We have lift-off," Sulman muttered, as he dialed up the electron bombardment. Inside the microscope electrons spat out, into, and off the sample in a focused beam. An image began to cohere on the screen.
"Well holy shit," Anna whispered.
17. T4
They'd taken hundreds of samples before and run them through optical microscopes. They'd already seen the vague beads of shrunken nuclei in every cell, the dark smears that had to be mitochondria, the thickened cell walls and the deep loss of plasma, allowing the cells to somehow run almost completely 'dry'. At that low level of resolution the cells looked essentially normal, but withered on the inside, just like the ocean were on the outside.
There'd been so much for them to learn about the ocean over the past ten years, and Anna in particular had sucked it all up. She'd studied as many samples as she could in hope of finding a key that could be unturned.
She hadn't seen this though.
On the screen the gray scale image presented a vastly exploded view of several brain ganglion cells, spread like ringed planets on a starscape littered with long fibrous hairs. Sulman zoomed the image in, focusing on a single cell. It was beautiful and bizarre, if a little blurry.
"Those are DNA strands, I think," said Jake, pointing to the thin hairs within the cell structure. "Should those be there?"
The image twitched then a second later vanished. Nobody else spoke for a moment.
"Burned up," Sulman said. "I'll bring it back from memory."
The image came back to life and they all leaned in. Sulman tinkered with the resolution and the dark dot of the nucleus came into finer relief. Anna pressed her face so close she almost blocked the screen. The image of the single cell twitched and shifted slightly as the second or two of footage they'd captured recycled.
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